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In their relationship to Europe, both Britain and Romania are situated at the continent’s edge, but that is where any list of comparisons between the two countries usually ends. Certainly, both countries are members of the European Union, but their respective responses to the European Union differ markedly. Polls conducted by Eurobarometer consistently put Romanians among the most enthusiastic supporters of the European Union, and the British (along with the Greeks) among the least. But what are the historical roots of Romanian and British attitudes towards Europe and the European idea?
27 July 2015
Prof. Martyn Rady More...

Young people in the UK today who are attracted to extremism are typically well educated. Given the weaknesses of this ideology in terms of its use of history, internal coherence of arguments and moral standards, its success with many educated young people requires explanation. The explanation, according to Dr. Farid, is multifaceted but education has a big role to play in curbing the trend.2 June 2015Dr. Farid Panjwani More...

Christopher Bickerton, lecturer in Politics at the University of Cambridge, discusses how how the impending EU referendum in the UK necessitates open and unbiased academic debate, and how British discussions of EU reform may reverberate across the European continent.15 May 2015Dr. Christopher Bickerton More...

Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi are pioneers of found-footage films that testify to the spectres of war, genocide and colonialism. Renowned for their landmark experimental work From the Pole to the Equator, they have redefined the documentary form, manipulating rare archival footage through re-photography, hand-tinted colour, and adjustment of the film’s speed.

On 21 Nov 2011, we dedicated an evening to three of their films, in cooperation with the Italian Cultural Institute in London and coinciding with a retrospective held at the Tate Modern.

The title of this film refers to the lake at Nemi outside Rome, a place
sacred to the goddess Diana. The notorious emperor Caligula kept huge
pleasure galleys here for recreation. When archeologists drained the
lake and reconstructed the vessels during the Fascist period, Mussolini
himself paid a special visit. The documentary footage of the events is
re-worked by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi against the grain
of the original propaganda message in which the glories of ancient Rome
and the glories of Mussolini’s empire were presented as continuous. The
second part, using original film of the campaign in Tripoli in 1926,
underlines the ruthless militarism of the regime. The images are
accompanied by the haunting minimalist sound track composed by Keith
Ullrich.

Animali criminali (Criminal Animals)1994, 16mm, colour, silent, 7’

The
idea of ‘criminal animals’ is drawn from the writings of Cesare
Lombroso, the criminologist who is the subject of one of Yervant
Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s early ‘scented films’ - Cesare
Lombroso. Sull’odore del garofano (Cesare Lombroso. On the Scent of
Carnation, 1976). In a series of tableaux vivants, drawn from old film
footage, animals are placed one in front of another to illustrate how in
Nature every relationship is essentially between hunter and prey, life
and death, in a ferocious struggle for existence. For Lombroso, human
society, like Nature, is organised on the principle of the survival of
the fittest.. This short exemplifies the way that Gianikian and Ricci
Lucchi’s films use human attitudes towards and treatment of animals as a
metaphor for how life and death are understood in society.

Mario Giacomelli: Contacts1993, 35mm, black and white, 13’

Unedited
footage of the Italian photographer Mario Giacomelli. Mario Giacomelli
came from an impoverished family. He started out as a Sunday painter,
and by the late 1950s had become Italy's foremost photographer. His work
focuses on the themes of fate, old age and death, and man and the
earth.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

Yervant Gianikian, born in Italy in 1942 of Armenian origin, studied architecture in Venice. Angela Ricci-Lucchi,
born in 1942 in Lugo di Romagna, studied painting in Austria with Oskar
Kokoschka. Living in Milan, they have worked with film since the
mid-seventies, firstly making scented films, and then re-working the old
films in their collection that they tinted, toned and re-edited. Their
oeuvre now consists of over 40 films of different lengths. Their most
recent short work, Notes sur nos voyages en Russie 1989 – 1990, was
included in this year’s Venice Film Festival.

Co-curator and cultural historian Robert Lumley (UCL) discussed the work with the filmmakers and with Robert Gordon (Cambridge). Robert Lumley is Professor of Italian Cultural History at UCL.
His new book on the filmmakers Entering the Frame: Cinema and History in
the Films of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi (Peter Lang,
2011) was presented as part of the event. Robert Gordon is
Professor of Italian at Cambridge University and author of, among other
books, Primo Levi's Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford
University Press, 2001).